Logo Open Text
Open Text, a well known leader in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space have announced their financial results for their third quarter which ended March 31. As compared to the same quarter last year (prior to the Hummingbird acquisition in August 2006) both total revenues and software license revenues were strongly up over 50% while profit sharply dropped 47 percent, related to higher operating costs and a number of one-time expenses.The company has again claimed that the Hummingbird integration is near done and that customers are happy with it. CEO Shackleton stated that "The Hummingbird integration is for the most part complete, and I continue to be pleased with the positive response from our customers and the synergies we are realizing from our employees and products." Open Text's strategy of broad integrations and strong partnerships seems to be holding steady and paying off handsomely. The company earned US$ 3.9 million, or 8 cents per share, down from US$ 7.3 million, or 15 cents per share, during the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings totaled $17.5 million, or 34 cents per share, for the most recent quarter. According to Thomson Financial, industry analysts were expecting earnings in the neighborhood of 31 cents per share. During trading in the day prior to the announcement the company's shares hit US$ 25, not an all time high, but certainly the highest point we've seen since August 2004. Open Text stock has been on a strong rally since the Hummingbird acquisition last August. The shares closed yesterday prior to the announcement at US$ 24.35. In after-hours trading, they fell another 60 cents to $23.75. Released just prior to their earnings announcement the ECM giant unwrapped an agreement with enterprise applications provider SAP. Open Text and SAP have formed a reseller partnership whereby SAP will be reselling Open Text Livelink ECM solutions. SAP, who is a long time partner of Open Text, will resell applications marketed under the names "SAP Archiving by Open Text" and "SAP Document Access by Open Text." The two primary components will address data and document archiving and document access in an SAP application environment: * SAP Archiving by Open Text
Provides the imaging, SAP data and document archiving components of Livelink ECM. It is a secure solution that stores data on optical media or compliant disk storage with logical to physical archive management. It is designed specifically to lower the cost and risk of meeting data retention and destruction requirements. * SAP Document Access by Open Text
Incorporates the archiving solution, but extends it with the ability to provide SAP applications with a process-oriented and application-spanning views of business records across both SAP and non-SAP applications. According to a statement made by SAP, "more than 70 percent of SAP customers still do not have a compliant archiving and document management solution," furthermore and as CMSWire readers know, there are more than a few legal pressures these days to have clear and implemented policies for business records archival and retention. SAP Archiving by Open Text and SAP Document Access by Open Text can be purchased and supported directly from SAP.